Willie Desjardins was the head coach of the Team Canada world junior team in 2010.

Photograph by: Roy Antal
, Regina Leader-Post

Both times he took his junior team to the Memorial Cup last decade, coach Willie Desjardins invited illustrious alumnus Trevor Linden to speak to the Medicine Hat Tigers.

Desjardins must have loved what he heard, and Linden what he saw.

Desjardins’ 30-year journey towards a National Hockey League head coaching position may end on the longest day of the year when the man from Climax, Sask., is interviewed this weekend by Linden, the Vancouver Canucks’ president of hockey operations.

After guiding the Texas Stars to the American Hockey League championship on Tuesday, Desjardins reportedly spurned a head-coaching offer from the Pittsburgh Penguins to pursue a better deal with the Canucks.

“The guy I had is going to go in a different direction,” Penguins general manager Jim Rutherford told the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review Friday afternoon.

It’s possible Desjardins has been headed to Vancouver from the start.

The Canucks’ coaching search has been handled entirely and privately by Linden, general manager Jim Benning and vice-president of hockey administration TC Carling, a former communications executive brought back to the NHL team by Linden. Even team owner Francesco Aquilini, whose family was highly involved in the process a year ago when former general manager Mike Gillis hired former coach John Tortorella (emphasis on former), has been outside the interview room.

Almost nothing has permeated Canuck management’s cone of silence, which led of course to plenty of conjecture filling the information void.

But Desjardins’ name has been linked to the Canucks since Linden fired Tortorella on May 1.

Linden said he wanted a “career coach” but not necessarily one with NHL head-coaching experience. He said he wanted a coach who could communicate with all types of players, one who would play an aggressive, entertaining style.

He may have been describing Desjardins, who during his eight years in Medicine Hat made it a point on long road trips to leave his seat at the front of the bus and engage individual players in lengthy, meaningful conversations. He wanted to understand them, to know them. With Desjardins, unlike Tortorella, one size does not fit all.

His teams in the WHL and AHL attacked and pressed the opposition while winning. Before that, Desjardins coached at the University of Calgary, and in Japan, and in Canada’s national-team program.

Between the Tigers and Texas, Desjardins spent his only two years in the NHL as the Dallas Stars’ associate coach, hired by Marc Crawford in 2010 and retained for one season by Glen Gulutzan, now a Canucks assistant.

Several hockey people told us you can’t find anyone in the game who doesn’t respect and like Desjardins. If he has made enemies in Pittsburgh, apparently it’s a first. All he has done, seemingly, is win with integrity.

But that only makes the glaring question more obvious: Why, at age 57, has he not been an NHL head coach?

That, by the way, is as interesting and personal a comment as you’re going to get from him.

If Desjardins joins Benning, Vancouver reporters will need enhanced interrogation techniques to coax a colourful quote from the two guys running the Canucks.

Benning and Linden had wanted to interview Los Angeles Kings assistant John Stevens, but he took himself off the head-coaching market this week by signing a new, presumably lucrative, deal to be Darryl Sutter’s associate coach on the Stanley Cup champions.

Former Nashville coach Barry Trotz, an obvious fit for the Canucks, cancelled a planned interview in Vancouver when the Washington Capitals refused to take “maybe” for an answer four weeks ago. Until Friday, it looked like the Canucks might miss out on Desjardins, too.

But, like we said, maybe this was the plan all along. No one will ever say so if it was.

According to former Vancouver Giants coach Don Hay, a good friend of Desjardins, it was Desjardins’ decision to leave the Dallas Stars for their AHL affiliate because he would rather be a head coach than an assistant, even if it meant working in the minors.

“He believes in the right things and wants to make the decisions,” Hay said Friday. “He wants to be the guy that people look at as the leader. He could have stayed as an assistant in the NHL but didn’t want that. He wanted the opportunity to run his own program. He wanted to show what he could do at that (AHL) level.”

Desjardins merely went 91-40-21 in two seasons with the Texas Stars, winning the organization’s first Calder Cup.

Still, if Desjardins joins the Canucks, Vancouver will have a first-time president, rookie general manager and a head coach untried at the NHL level.

“I think Willie is really ready to work with elite athletes at the top level,” Hay said. “He is a smart guy who has learned at every step along the way. He’s a very intense individual who just goes about his job. Players enjoy playing for him because of the way he deals with them. I think that’s what people should look at — Willie gets his players ready every night.”

And he could sell a few Canucks season tickets in Medicine Hat, where Linden and Desjardins remain hugely popular. Come to think of it, with Benning from Edmonton, maybe Alberta’s team will be the Canucks and not the Oilers or Flames.

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